BINF 704 Spring 2008 Colloquium

Instructor - Dr.Jeff Solka (jlsolka@gmail.com)

Meeting Place - Prince William Bull Run Hall Rm 134
Meeting Time - 4:30-6:00 pm Tuesdays

Course Webpage  
http://binf.gmu.edu/~jsolka/spring08/binf704/Spring_2008BINF_704_colloquium_Syllabus_rev1.html

Course Description:

This course will provide an opportunity to learn about ongoing bioinformatics research outside of George Mason University. The students in this class will be exposed to presentations by a number of different researchers in a number of different bioinformatics research areas.

Prerequisites:

Good standing in the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Department

Required Text:

None

Grading:

Grades will be based on 10 short reports on the speakers, each approximately 2 paragraphs in length. These ½ page summaries of the talks CANNOT just be the speaker’s abstract and are due 1 week after the speaker’s presentation. Students are expected to produce these reports for 10 of the 14 planned presentations.

In addition a summary report for one of the talks must be created ahead of time prior to the speaker’s presentation based on the student’s analysis of a minimum of two papers by the speaker. This 3-5 page summary report must be prepared ahead of time and should end with five questions they would like to ask the speaker to answer about their work. All citations have to be given in full, including extra Web sites used. The students are warned to be very careful with regards to plagiarism issues. This particular summary report must be turned in a week prior to the speaker’s planned presentation. A seminar can be covered by both a report and a summary report, since sometimes the speaker does not cover all the materials in their papers in the seminar.

Projected Class Schedule

Jan. 22, 2008                                      Jeff Solka

An Examination of Latent Semantic Indexing and Its Application to Discovery

Jeffrey L. Solka, Avory Bryant, and Nick Tucey

This presentation will discuss some of our recent work in latent semantic indexing (LSI) and its application to automated discovery. The interaction between LSI and synonymy and polysemy will be discussed along with the application of LSI to document and term-based discovery. This presentation is based on our recent presentations on the 7^th Annual Hawaii Conference on Statistics, Mathematics, and Related Fields

Jan. 29, 2008                                      Carey Priebe

Carey E. Priebe
Department of Applied Mathematics & Statistics
and Center for Imaging Science
Johns Hopkins University

INFERENCE ON INTERPOINT COMPARISONS:
AN APPLICATION IN COMPUTATIONAL ANATOMY

Abstract:
We present results from
an MRI morphometry study of the human brain
via diffeomorphic metric mapping, multidimensional scaling,
and (linear) discriminant analysis.
(This is joint work with ... a cast of thousands!)

Feb. 5, 2008                                       Susan Cropp                                  

Feb. 12, 2008                                     TBD

Feb. 19, 2008                                     Peter Munson

Feb. 26, 2008                                     Cristian I. Castillo-Davis

Mar. 4, 2008                                       Tony Zukas

Mar. 11, 2008                                     No Classes Spring Break

Mar. 18. 2008                                     Ben Matthews

Mar. 25, 2008                                     Kellie Archer

April 1, 2008                                      Yuan Gao

April 8, 2008                                      Alan Berger

April 15, 2008                                    Brandon Higgs

April 22, 2008                                   Jennifer Weller

April 29, 2008                                    Weiqun Peng

May 13, 2008                                     No Final Exam Given All Late Assignments Due